AMD is going to make a revolution in the inexpensive processors market by launching their new quad-core Athlon II X4 series that will be selling at very democratic prices. The secret of these processors hides in the new 45 nm Propus core that has no L3 cache memory. But how fast are these babies?

Performance in Applications

During data archiving, Athlon II X4 falls about 10% behind Core 2 Quad Q8200 showing almost the lowest result among all testing participants with the only exception of the dual-core Core 2 Duo E7500.

During Excel calculations things look even worse. This application is well optimized for multi-threaded load and Athlon II X4 processors can only compete against dual-core Intel solutions. If we compare their performance against other AMD processors, these quad-core CPUs without the L3 cache will be about as fast as triple-core Phenom II X3 equipped with an L3 cache.

We can see approximate parity between Athlon II X4 and Phenom II X3 in Adobe Photoshop CS4. But Athlon II X4 is again significantly behind competing Intel solutions: quad-core as well as dual-core ones.

However, during non-linear video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 the new Athlon II X4 CPUs show brilliant results, just as during simple video transcoding.

The new processors also cope quite well with final rendering. In fact, there is nothing surprising about it: it is just another computational task that doesn’t set any special requirements to the memory subsystem.